COLUMN ONE : A Hell for Have-Nots in Sarajevo : Elderly widow Nada Lisse subsists on rotten vegetables and longs for medicine for her friend. Meanwhile, the rich and the corrupt enjoy bounty of a black market that controls everything from food to freedom.

The single room of Nada Lisse’s apartment reeks of spoiled cabbage and unwashed flesh. There is no money to buy soap, and the pot of old vegetables has to last until the next day’s lunch.

It is fall, but the 71-year-old widow is already paralyzed by dread of the coming winter.

“It was on that couch in the corner that Emina froze to death last winter,” the old woman says of her neighbor’s sister, who had sought refuge from worse cold one story above. “We thought she was sick, but when we got her to the hospital the doctors told us she was dead.”

The aching poverty afflicting Lisse contrasts brutally with the bounty on display at public markets throughout the city and with the hopeful outlook younger Sarajevans have developed as signs of normal life have returned. Here, the crowded cafes and brisk trade in coveted goods--such as liquor and passes to travel--might create an impression of a city that has the worst of war’s hardships behind it.

But Sarajevo, in reality, has become a place of haves and have-nots. It is a city where black marketeers control everything from food to freedom. In Sarajevo, as in the corruption-ridden postwar Vienna of Graham Greene’s “The Third Man,” everything--even survival--has its price.

Life for most Sarajevans is an existence as grim as Lisse’s--endless days spent staring out broken windows at smoldering dumpsters or aimlessly plodding through rubble-strewn streets. Many endure an eternity from handout to handout, with no prospects for employment and all hopes for relief dashed.

But for those on the dealing end of the ubiquitous black markets, the dreariness can be tempered by luxuries acquired with ill-gotten gains. Fortunes amassed by trading across the front lines have bought fast cars that were smuggled in during the five-month period when one road into Sarajevo was open; black-market gasoline can be had for about $30 a gallon through a franchise controlled by the Ukrainian contingent of the U.N. peacekeeping force.

For a select few, such as liquor magnate Muhammed Kulasevic, this world, corrupted by conflict, can even be left behind. He can fly out on a U.N. plane with the humanitarian evacuation credentials that he says he made a deal for with Western European sources.

Meantime, influence-peddling is so pervasive that have-nots, such as Lisse, seem to be little bothered by the rampant social injustice.

As she reminisces about the better days behind her, when her husband was alive and she worked at an Austrian-owned bank, Lisse recalls with relish the taste of cheese and the smell of perfume.

But if she could have any one item now, she says, it would be eardrops for her beloved friend and neighbor, Sanija Talic, 75. Talic, who lost her sister to January’s bitter cold, is legally blind and is at risk of losing her hearing.

Both women scoff and wave away an outlandish suggestion that they might get the drops Talic needs from a hospital pharmacy. (A U.N.-operated humanitarian airlift has brought in food and medicine to this besieged city for more than two years.)

“We’re just two useless old women,” Lisse says, amusedly dismissing the chance of securing a commodity as rare as eardrops. “We could only dream of having such connections.”

A doctor at Kosevo Hospital confirms there is no such treatment in stock. Any medicines, beyond the basics needed for trussing wounds and curing infections, are siphoned off by the army.

The army, and, thereby the government, controls most aid and commerce in Sarajevo through a labyrinthine system of licensing, franchises and favors.

Fuad Colpa owns what was one of Sarajevo’s most popular businesses before the war: the Bazeni restaurant built into the stone embankment at a scenic curve of the Miljacka River.

Colpa explains that the only way to reopen his business when the worst of the shelling stopped in February was to secure a “priority use” designation from the government for water, electricity and other on-again, off-again utilities.

In exchange for the rating intended for hospitals, bakeries and other vital facilities, Colpa pays the local government a special tax--some might call it a kickback--that amounts to about $4,000 per month.

For Colpa, as important as the guarantee of water and power to run the restaurant is the permission to serve liquor that accompanies his priority rating.

“In wartime, it is forbidden to serve alcohol, but if you are a priority enterprise, it’s no problem,” Colpa says. “And if you don’t serve alcohol, you don’t have any business. People are drinking more now than ever, especially in the Old Town, which is at least 95% Muslim.”

The ruling Party for Democratic Action led by Bosnia’s Muslim president, Alija Izetbegovic, occupies most local government offices and strongly influences the army.

Atop the outright payments received for doling out priority ratings to lucrative businesses like Colpa’s, the government takes one-third of the value of everything brought into the city through the only access way available: a not-so-secret tunnel under Sarajevo’s U.N.-controlled airport.

The tunnel, which runs from the city encircled by Bosnian Serbs to another area held by the Muslim government, was built last year by the army and remains under strict military control.

“The army gets 33% of everything they bring through the tunnel, which is a lot now that the Blue Route is closed,” confirms a humanitarian aid official, referring to the sole commercial road into this city of 380,000 people that was cinched off by Serbian rebels in late July. “The soldiers have recently installed rails on the tunnel floor and brought in six mining cars, so now all they have to do is push the goods through the tunnel.”

Shipments of coffee, sugar, beer and other supplies ordered by enterprises such as Bazeni’s move at the convenience of the army, which often needs to clear the narrow tunnel to transport troops for the ongoing battles along more than 1,000 miles of front line.

But as the main, hard-currency-earning activity surviving in the Bosnian capital, the soldiers manning the tunnel provide reliable-enough deliveries for restaurateurs to order fresh meat and seafood with their more durable staples.

The price for escape through the tunnel is determined by a more complicated formula, one in which prewar personal connections appear to be as strong an influence as the quantity of deutsche marks or dollars changing hands. A dizzying array of permissions and clearances is needed to leave this city, which for all practical purposes is closed to the outside world.

Those who would flee need: an army authorization to move through the nearly mile-long tunnel; a sheaf of documents, including an all-but unobtainable military service waiver to an employer’s attestation that the applicant’s absence would not harm the capital’s defense.

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The ultimate in clout that has sprung up in battered Sarajevo is a U.N. “blue card.” Such a document is intended to allow senior government officials to travel abroad for important meetings or to clear humanitarian hardship cases for evacuation. It allows the bearer to fly out of Sarajevo on U.N. aircraft, which depart the capital several times daily, as conditions allow.

Kulasevic, the liquor magnate better known among Sarajevo’s trading kingpins as Muki, has neither illness nor official capacity to justify his credentials. His diamond pinky ring and Ray Ban sunglasses testify to his ample means, but he is coy about the details of his “blue card” acquisition.

The stout 36-year-old has also been exempted from military service, despite the full mobilization of adult men that has been in effect since Serbian nationalist rebels began besieging this city in April, 1992.

“My business is vital to the army, which is why I am exempt,” he explains with a knowing grin. “Somebody has to keep the army supplied so it can function.”

Indeed, much of the activity that would be deemed corruption in peacetime is justified by officials as a necessary evil inflicted by a war that supporters of a multicultural society never wanted.

With little functioning industry to produce tax revenue, those involved in the favor network explain, the government must raise hard currency through unconventional sources to feed, clothe and arm the force that protects what is left of the country.

“Since the economy is not functioning, it is good that food is being brought in by whatever methods,” says taxi driver Sabriji Sebo, who pays at least one-third of his monthly earnings of less than $200 in taxes, license fees and priority access to gasoline.

“But those making millions while most people suffer should be punished. When the war is over and we have a real state, they should be brought to justice. One day they will have to answer for what they did.”

But for the elderly, such as Lisse, and Bosnia’s 2 million hungry and displaced, there is little comfort in contemplating the remote possibility of a comeuppance for those who took advantage of their suffering.

The price of smuggled eardrops for Talic is so far beyond the imaginations of either widow that they haven’t even inquired in what they suspect are the right places.

So they hold hands and stare out the window together. They are content with sharing experiences, instead of retelling them to each other later. And they count as a blessing the futility of putting into words their fears of the coming winter.